Yep, this was the unique sound of the BBC’s Easter adaptation of Jamaica Inn: a drama with such unintelligible dialogue that it might have been better to turn it into a quiz show whose title asked: Jamaica Word Out? and then see if any viewer actually did.

There are lots of TV series where I would welcome a few problems in the technical department.

Mock The Week would be a lot funnier if you could not hear what anyone was saying.

Question Of Sport would be perfect if it had no sound at all or picture.

This lavish new Jamaica Inn, however, adapted from one of Daphne du Maurier’s finest adventure stories and with an elite cast including Ray Winstone and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay, seemed a terrible waste.

It was a lavishly staged drama and the very best things on TV in recent times have all been dramas: from Broadchurch last year to Line Of Duty this.

Rev, which started out as a comedy during its first series, has gradually matured into a drama and is all the more powerful for it.

Mock The Week would be a lot funnier if you could not hear what anyone was saying

One of the very best in recent weeks has been Endeavour, the prequel to Morse and Lewis which not only functioned as a cracking entertainment and whoduunnit but also threw up a truly fascinating character in the shape of Roger Allam’s Detective Inspector Fred Thursday.

Endeavour was set in the 1960s but it would be more accurate to say that it inhabited it because the 1960s seemed to seep into every detail of every frame, from the homely shabbiness of the detectives’ suits to the sooty light in which the whole thing had been shot.

Even the paper that Fred’s wife wrapped his sandwiches in seemed to have that stiff, crinkled quality that belonged wholly to 1966 and all that.

But it was Fred’s manner of speaking that took me back most vividly.

Thank heavens this ITV series was not dogged by poor sound because the dialogue was magnificent.

Thursday talks in truncated clichés just as all policemen, prison warders and even some criminals themselves used to.

“Take the weight off, Morse...”

“I’m thinking of retiring. Every dog...”

I had relatives who talked like this when I was growing up. “Cheer up, son. Every cloud.” The paternal solidness of Fred Thursday belonged to another age.

These were men of staunch working-class or lower middle-class stock who had served in the Second World War and joined the police almost as a matter of course.

Some of them became railway inspectors, too, or postmen: any career in which, in the 1960s at least, discipline and a sense of duty were the most important qualities.

Such types seem almost nonexistent now. If they are around at all, they are in their dotage: too old, perhaps, even to quietly tend their gardens, pipe in mouth, hand in the pocket of the old suit trousers they habitually wore as “casual” dress.

We are all the poorer as a society for being without them.

There is a lovely scene in Endeavour in which a young thug who has been told to come quietly by Thursday thrusts his chin out and says: “And what will you do if I don’t?” Thursday replies: “Then, I’m afraid, I will be forced to remove my hat.”

This is the sort of quiet, intelligent authority that is so lacking these days in the police force, in particular.

It is impossible to imagine, for instance, any character in Endeavour raising his voice to a suspect let alone resorting to that symbol of modern police impotence, the Taser, in order to get their way.

Such authority has also disappeared from Government, from banking, from all of our service industries. Where is the good, solid yeoman of old?

These were the men who would silently take control when everyone around them was losing their heads.

They were your grandfather, and mine. They were our older, wiser uncles too.

They were the blokes who could fix any car, stop the water coming through the ceiling, calm a crying child by making a penny appear from behind his ear.

At the BBC they would have been the fellow, almost retired, virtually ignored, perhaps even laughed at a bit for his “quaint old ways”, until a crisis ensued and they were the only ones who knew what they were doing.

Last Monday it is this chap who would have been called up from his cubby-hole full of tools and wiring in the bowels of Broadcasting House and told by a sweating producer or middle-manager to quickly “fix” Jamaica Inn before the programme went out with rotten sound.

He wasn’t though, and it did. Plainly those chaps are no longer there.